How to stop your B2B sales team talking about what they're selling!

Hello Sales Reset Leader

What’s the most common selling mistake your team members are probably making?

Of course, I don’t know the details of your specific situation.

And there are lots of selling mistakes available! 😀

However, over the years I’ve been training and coaching salespeople, one thing has always made it to the top of the list:

There are many reasons why your team members might spend too much time talking about what they’re selling. Here are the leading causes:

• Expectations: When customers take time to talk with sellers, everybody expects the conversation to be about what’s being sold!

• Answering Questions: Customers inevitably have questions, and salespeople typically believe it’s their job to answer them. They think, “Great, they’re asking questions. That’s a buying signal!” Consequently, too much of the limited time spent with customers is spent talking about products and services, not the outcomes customers seek.

• Confidence: Your team members are likely to be much more confident talking about their products and services than trying to understand the unique details of their customer’s situations.

• Priorities: Unfortunately, some of your team members might prioritise their need to sell and achieve their sales targets above the importance of identifying and meeting their customer's needs.

In this week’s edition of Weekly Sales Reset, your team members are reminded about the significance of sharing insights and coaching their customers:

• Insights: When we talk about insights, we mean valuable knowledge that reveals new perspectives, challenges or opportunities.

• Coaching Skills: This is the expertise to help customers define their needs more accurately and have the confidence to continue developing proposals and plans.

We recommend this structured process:

1. Insight: Share some valuable insight with your customer.

2. Coaching: Use your coaching skills to enable your customers to think through the implications of this insight.

3. Outcomes: Your coaching goal is to enable your customers to clarify the outcomes they might seek from your shared insight.

4. Actions: This conversation will ideally lead to clear next actions. Which might include reviewing how your products and services might help! 😀

How can you help your team members this week?

We recommend reinforcing these themes in your weekly sales meetings and coaching sessions.

Remind your team members about the significance and value of the insights they can share with customers.

It would be great if you could proactively help all your team members share their best market sector insights with their colleagues. Even better would be if your team shared stories of what happened when they shared their insights with customers and what happened next!

In their mid-week Weekly Sales Reset newsletter, your team members will be reminded of the core coaching skills they should use with their customers in their mid-week newsletter. These will include:

• Questioning Skills: Ask great questions that help customers reflect on their situation, identify more stakeholders, and articulate needs more accurately.

• Active Listening: Listening not just to what customers say but, more importantly, listening to what customers are trying to say. Customers may not have all the vocabulary or knowledge required to express themselves as effectively as they’d prefer.

• Emotional Intelligence: Recognising and managing our own emotions, empathising and building trust and rapport.

• Focus on Outcomes: Helping customers develop plans and priorities that lead to clearly defined and measurable success criteria.

The best way to help your team members use coaching skills with their customers

The very best way you can help your team members to be great coaches with their customers is for you to model effective coaching yourself.

The coaching culture you establish with your team will profoundly affect your team’s selling practices.

When you demonstrate coaching in all your interactions, you and your team will learn much more and much faster.

The coaching culture you establish will lead directly to your team members using coaching skills more effectively with their customers.

Have a great week!

Do all your team members subscribe to our companion weekly newsletter, Weekly Sales Reset?